Well, Free Day turned out to be a time waster for me again this year. After trying to get in at the moment Free Day began, I could never get all the way in (clicked link to see quiz, but never arrived there). I tried repeatedly for several hours. After several years, it's time for me to seek more reliable suppliers.

Here's an amusing yet pathetic email I received from SparkFun (my highlighting) following this sojourn:

SparkFun thanks you for your participation in Free Day 2011!

Free Day 2011 has come and gone - thank you for participating. Initial reports are that we've given away $150,451.00 to our customers and set aside another $22,988.00 for charity. Be sure to watch for the Free Day 2011 Recap for final numbers, statistics, and pretty graphs!

You chose to gamble with the quiz questions. You attempted 0 questions. Unfortunately, you didn't win any money this time around.

Not to be too snarky about this, every vendor who has no Free Day yields a better bargain for me - no lost time achieving nothing. What's needed by whoever plans a Free Day is something that works reliably.

Meh...it was a promotion. It was consequence-free; it didn't cost anything to try and if you were one of the lucky few and got a crumb or two for your efforts, bully for you. Those who sat at their computers furiously hitting F5 for hours on end (or who wrote scripts to do same) need to have their heads examined... As for myself, I tried to log in just before the "official" start and got a 404 error. After a few minutes of refreshing and getting cutesy "Something broke" messages, I moved on. I wasn't able to check out a cart worth ~$300 until later that day but that's the extent of my "inconvenience."

Having said that, I will be one of those that won't bother with this next year. I'll just stay away from SFE's site for a few hours. SFE has every right to run whatever promotions it wants but is clearly not really interested in upping its server capacity in a serious way (otherwise last-year's result would have had them better-prepared this year.) This is just a marketing gimmick and by all accounts, a pretty good one at that: People are, after all, talking about SFE, right? To paraphrase Brendan Behan, "there's no such thing as bad publicity..."

I would say the only "lame" thing about it was hinging loyalty rewards on managing to win this DDOS "lottery."

Ok, fair enough. It was a waste of time for me to arrange where I'd be and what I'd do on the chance that I'd get to gamble (I didn't) in the Free Day quiz. I imagine it wasn't just me, with whatever personal "issues" you might imagine I have, that lost time. In summary, a poorly executed promotion.